The primary responsibilities of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology (BCB) research team will be to participate in the CFAR research effort by supplying experimental design and data-analytical consulting during the developmental stages of new projects and in the preparation of grant proposals and to work with investigators on innovative approaches to informatics and mathematical/statistical modeling. The areas supported will include clinical biostatistics and computational biology, including gene expression and all aspects of nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis. In collaboration with Duke University Laboratory of Computational Immunology, the BCB core will also support methodological development and mathematical modeling of viral and immune dynamics. There will be two modes of interaction with the CFAR investigators. Under the first, new innovative projects will be treated as collaborative endeavors with no charge-back to the client. The expectation is that compensation will accrue to the BCB as collaborators on grants and contracts arising from this new work. Furthermore, the BCB may gain the opportunity to submit applications for related methodological work. Under the second model, ongoing projects with funding for statistical and/or computational biological work as well as industry-sponsored projects can contract with the BCB on a for-fee basis. The BCB core is devoted to the establishment and maintenance of easy communication with the CFAR investigators and the other cores. The BCB director, Dr. Thomas B. Kepler, has expertise in immunology (and a secondary appointment in the Duke Department of Immunology) as well as computational biology and statistics, which are his primary research fields. The core group will be trained to understand the science and medicine and the language in which they are expressed.